Doyel: How the national anthem became an unlikely Christmas story in New Pal

When Layla Lawhorn lost her way in singing the national anthem, fellow New Palestine students and basketball players Avery Biggs and Tatum Biddle stepped up to help. Pretty soon, everyone in the gym was singing.(Photo: Provided by Al Cooper)

INDIANAPOLIS – This isn’t your normal Christmas story. In Christmas stories, people don’t cry from embarrassment in a basketball gymnasium in New Palestine. They don’t nearly die in an accident on I-74. A home isn’t left without a husband, a father. Not in any Christmas story I’ve ever read.

But this isn’t your normal Christmas story. It spans from an interstate in Shelby County in August to a gym at New Pal, four months later. To a little girl crying from embarrassment, then gratitude. It’s the story of one beautiful rainbow in a storm of fury and ferocity — just one moment, to be clear, and the storm rages today. But the moment happened, one they’ll be talking about for years. And perhaps, just perhaps, there is a break in the clouds.

No, this isn’t your normal Christmas story. But what you’re about to read, it happened in New Palestine. It moved a child in tears. And she wasn’t the only one.

'Whole bag of cough drops'

Layla Lawhorn has a beautiful voice.

She tried out for “The Voice,” and made the second cut. A singer, I tell you: When she was in junior high, she sang the national anthem at her school’s wrestling matches and basketball games, maybe 10 or 12 times in all. She’s in high school now, a sophomore at New Pal, and what happened the other night had never happened before.

The New Castle boys basketball team was in town to play the Dragons, and while Layla is a New Pal cheerleader, on this night she was pulling double duty: Singing the national anthem before the game. She wasn’t feeling great that day, running a small fever with a sore throat, but this was her first anthem at a high school game, and she’d made a commitment.

“I’ve always been the one to tough it out,” Layla says.

She’s talking to me by phone from the office of Al Cooper, the New Pal athletic director, and in the background I can hear Cooper prompting Layla.

“Tell him what you told me when I asked how you were feeling before the game,” Cooper is saying. The phone goes silent for a moment. Layla can’t remember. The night we’re talking about, a Friday night, Dec. 14, it was a blur. You’ll see why in a minute. Cooper fills the silence:

“This is what she said: ‘I’ve had a whole bag of cough drops.’”

So, the anthem.

Layla is at midcourt and she starts singing. No music out of the public-address system, just Layla and the microphone, and she’s doing great. She’s done it before. She’s got this.

Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light …

She keeps going, but her brain is overloaded. She’s not feeling well, and besides, she’d received a text message a few minutes before the game. More bad news. Some of the students in the crowd, they don’t know about the bad news. They don’t know what Layla Lawhorn has been going through at home. Before I tell you what happened next, you need to read that text message.

Something happened to Dad.

The accident

The accident was nearly four months ago. It happened on eastbound Interstate 74, near mile marker 121. That’s what police say.

A minivan rear-ended a semi tractor-trailer. That’s what police say. The driver of the minivan was a pastor from New Pal, a husband, a father of five girls. You’ve met his second-oldest daughter, Layla Lawhorn.

The driver of the semi was uninjured, but Loren Lawhorn, 48, was flown to IU Health Medical Center in critical condition: several bones broken, multiple organs damaged, brain trauma. Nearly four months later, he hasn’t come home. He emerged from the coma in late October, and now is in a rehab facility, trying to walk and talk again. On the evening of Dec. 14, Layla was about to sing the anthem when she received a text from the rehab center.

Loren had fallen and hit his head against the wall. Scared everyone there, including his wife and medical personnel, but the fall didn’t do any additional damage. Nobody knew that at the time, though, and all Layla knew were those four words in the text message. She’d received that exact same text message once before, nearly four months earlier. On Aug. 27.

Here it was again.

Something happened to Dad.

“Oh great,” Layla remembers thinking. A few minutes later she’s on the court, singing an anthem she has performed a dozen times, but this has never happened.

Two or three lines in, she goes silent.

“The words went out of my head,” Layla says. “I was just like, ‘Great.’”

It was a big crowd that night, maybe 1,500 people in the arena. One second of silence passes. Two seconds. In the front row are two members of the New Pal girls basketball team, there to cheer on the boys, guard Avery Biggs and forward Tatum Biddle. They turn and look at each other.

Three seconds have passed.

“We just gave the look,” Avery says.

“And started singing together,” says Tatum.

“Without hesitation,” Avery says, “we started singing.”

O’er the ramparts, we watched …

By the time those ramparts were gallantly streaming, most of the New Pal student section was singing. Pretty soon the bombs are bursting in mid-air, and now the entire crowd is singing – New Pal and New Castle, all on the same team – and Layla Lawhorn is one of them. She’d been crying from humiliation. Now she’s crying out of gratitude.

“I was super devastated: ‘Oh, I really did that,’” Layla says. “As soon as they started singing, it was: ‘Oh, it’s going to be fine.’ I started crying harder. I thought it was really cool that everyone did that.”

Avery Biggs and Tatum Biddle tell me they don't know Layla well, and didn't know anything about her father's car accident. They just saw somebody suffering, and tried to help.

"Anybody would have done it," Tatum says.

In the crowd that night is the New Pal athletic director, Al Cooper. He’s looking around as he’s singing, swelling with pride at the students and the community coming together as one, and he sees an emotional charge pass through the arena. People are smiling. People are crying.

“I’m telling you,” Cooper says, “it was as cool a thing as anything I’ve been part of.”

This is a Christmas story, as I’ve said, but not a fairy tale. Loren Lawhorn is still in the rehab facility, but Layla says they are seeing progress.

“We’re all right, the entire family,” she says. “We’re all pushing through it.”

She sounds so strong, this high school sophomore, so positive in the face of something so hard. This is how she finishes our conversation, by referencing a gift the Lawhorn family hopes to receive soon.